A Customs and Border Protection agent watching surveillance footage. James Martin/CNET If you’re taking a trip in to or out of the US, border agents currently have free rein to search through your digital devices. Unlike police, agents don’t need a warrant to look through your phones, laptops and other electronics. Two US senators are hoping to change that with a bipartisan bill. Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, and Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, on Wednesday introduced the Protecting Data at the Border Act, which would require agents to obtain a warrant before they can search Americans’ devices at the border. The number of electronic searches at the border has spiked in the last four years. In 2018, the Department of Homeland Security conducted more than 33,000 searches on devices, compared with 4,764 searches in 2015. Customs and Border Protection declined to comment.”The border is quickly becoming a rights-free zone for Americans who travel. The government shouldn’t be able to review your whole digital life simply because you went on vacation, or had to travel for work,” Wyden said in a statement. The bill is also being introduced in the House of Representatives by a group of Democrats. Wyden and Paul introduced the same bill in 2017. Since then, warrantless device searches at the border increased by 10 percent.Law enforcement agencies have been taking advantage of the warrantless searches at the border, using the information discovered in unrelated court cases, the American Civil Liberties Union discovered through its related lawsuit against the DHS. Until a court makes a decision, the agency is still allowed to conduct these searches without a warrant. “Respecting civil liberties and our Constitution actually strengthens our national security, and Americans should not be forced to surrender their rights or privacy at the border,” Paul said. “Our bill will put an end to these intrusive government searches and uphold the fundamental protections of the Fourth Amendment.” Border wall dividing homes and habitat Politics Security 1 Now playing: Watch this: 2:09 Share your voice Comment Tagsread more

Prime minister Sheikh Hasina during her interaction with Gulf News in Abu Dhabi. – Photo courtesy: Gulf NewsPrime minister Sheikh Hasina has wondered why India’s parliament passed ‘Indian Citizenship Amendment Bill’ meant to give citizenship to minorities that faced “religious persecution” in neighbouring countries, including Bangladesh.The Bangladesh premier expressed her views in an interview with Gulf News in the UAE capital on Tuesday.“Why [us] this bill…I don’t understand,” she was quoted to have said. “Is it for election purpose?” Sheikh Hasina reportedly asked with a smile.Gulf News quoted her as saying that she never felt that the bill meant to blame Bangladesh for religious persecution of minorities in the country.“I don’t think so. There is no such [religious persecution] in Bangladesh. Some incidents have happened. But we took immediate action,” the premier was quoted to have said.She said religious extremism and terrorism are a global problem. “It is not in Bangladesh alone.”Sheikh Hasina reportedly said her understanding was that people in India are also not happy with the bill. “I think they [India] should not do anything that create tension.”Referring to her actions against Indian insurgents, who tried to operate from Bangladesh, she said, “They should consider all these factors as a neighbouring country.”read more

Deloitte launched their tenth annual “Tech Trends 2019: Beyond the digital frontier” report earlier this month. The report covers predictions related to Artificial intelligence, digital future, cloud, networking, and cybersecurity. Let’s have a look at these key predictions made in the report. More companies to transform into AI-fueled organizations Deloitte 2019 report states that there’ll be an increase in the number of companies following the transformation to fully autonomous AI-fueled firms in the next 18 to 24 months, making AI a major part of their corporate strategy. AI, machine learning, and other cognitive technologies run at the center of business and IT operations in an AI-fueled firm to harness data driven-insights. As per the two consecutive Deloitte global surveys (2016–17 and 2018), cognitive technologies/AI were at the top in a list of emerging technologies in which CIOs plan to invest. AI ambitions of these CIOs is more about using AI to increase productivity, and strengthen regulatory compliance using automation. Companies to make the transition from traditional to serverless environments (NoOps) The report states many CIOs will be looking at creating a NoOps IT environment that is automated and abstracted from the underlying infrastructure. It requires small teams to manage it and will thereby allow the CIOs to invest larger human capacity in developing new capabilities that can improve the overall operational efficiency. In NoOps environments, traditional operations like the code deployment and patching schedules are internal responsibilities and are mainly automated. This shift from traditional to serverless computing will allow the cloud vendors to dynamically and automatically allocate the compute, storage, and memory depending on the request for a higher-order service. Traditional cloud service models required organizations to manually design and provision such allocations. Serverless computing offers limitless scalability, high availability, NoOps, along with zero idle time costs. More companies are expected to take advantage of advanced connectivity to configure and operate enterprise networks As per the Deloitte report, many companies will opt for advanced networking to drive the development of new products and to transform inefficient operating models. CIOs are going to be virtualizing parts of the connectivity stack with the help of network management techniques like Software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). SDN is primarily used in data centers but its use is now being extended for wide area networking to connect data centers. NFV replaces network functions such as routing, switching, encryption, firewalling, WAN acceleration, etc, and can scale horizontally or vertically on demand. The report states that enterprises will be able to better optimize or “spin up” the network capabilities on demand to fulfill the needs of a specific application or meet the end-user requirements. Growth in interfaces like computer vision, gesture control devices, etc, will transform how humans, machines, and data interact with each other The report states that although conversational technologies are currently dominating the intelligent interfaces arena, other new additions in interfaces such as computer vision, gesture control devices, embedded eye-tracking platforms, bioacoustic sensing, and emotion detection/recognition technology, are gaining ground. Intelligent interfaces help track customers’ offline habits, similar to how search engines and social media companies track their customers’ digital habits. These interfaces also help understand the customers at a personal, and more detailed level, making it possible to “micro-personalize” the products and services. We will see more of these new interfaces combined with leading-edge technologies in the future (such as machine learning, robotics, IoT, contextual awareness, advanced augmented reality, and virtual reality) to transform the way we engage with machines, data, and each other. CMOs and CIOs will partner up to elevate the human experience by moving beyond marketing The report states that channel-focused services such as websites, social and mobile platforms, content management tools, search engine optimization are slowly becoming a thing of the past. Many organizations will be moving beyond marketing by adopting a new generation of Martech systems and approach to data gathering, decision-making (determining how and when to provide an experience), and delivery (consistent delivery of dynamic content across channels). This, in turn, helps companies create personalized and dynamic end-to-end experiences for users and builds deep emotional connections among users to products and brands. Also, CMOs are required to own the delivery of the entire customer experience, and they often find themselves almost playing the CIO’s traditional role. At the same time, CIOs are required to transform the legacy systems and come out with new infrastructure to support the next-generation data management and customer engagement systems. This is why CIOs and CMOs will collaborate more closely to deliver on their company’s new marketing strategies as well as on the established digital agendas. Organizations to embed DevSecOps to improve cybersecurity As per the report, many organizations have started to use a method called DevSecOps that includes embedding security culture, practices, and tools into different phases of their DevOps pipelines. DevSecOps help improves the security and maturity levels of a company’s DevOps pipeline. DevSecOps is not a security trend but it’s a new approach that offers companies a different way of thinking about security. DevSecOps has multiple benefits. It helps the security architects, developers, and operators share their metrics aligning to security and put a focus on business priorities. Organizations embedding DevSecOps into their development pipelines can use operational insights and threat intelligence. It also helps with proactive monitoring that involves automated, and continuous testing to identify problems. The report recommends that DevSecOps should tie in your broader IT strategy, which should be further driven by your business strategy. “If you can be deliberate about sensing and evaluating emerging technologies..you can make the unknown knowable..creating the confidence and construct to embrace digital while setting the stage to move beyond the digital frontier”, reads the report. For more information, check out the official Deloitte’s 2019 tech trends. 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